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+## Copyright (C) 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009 David Bateman and Andy Adler
+##
+## This file is part of Octave.
+##
+## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
+## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
+## your option) any later version.
+##
+## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
+## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
+## General Public License for more details.
+##
+## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
+## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
+
+## -*- texinfo -*-
+## @deftypefn {Function File} {@var{y} =} sphcat (@var{a1}, @var{a2}, @dots{}, @var{aN})
+## Return the horizontal concatenation of sparse matrices.  This function
+## is obselete and @code{horzcat} should be used instead.
+## @seealso {horzcat, spvcat, vertcat, cat}
+## @end deftypefn
+
+function y = sphcat (varargin)
+  persistent warned = false;
+  if (! warned)
+    warned = true;
+    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
+             "sphcat is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; please use horzcat instead");
+  endif
+
+  y = horzcat (varargin{:});
+endfunction